Share Article

CEO Ned Lilly honored for harnessing the power of global collaboration through open source development

Entrepreneurship is a series of hits and misses, trial and error.

Norfolk, Virginia (USA)(PRWEB) May 24, 2017

xTuple CEO Ned Lilly will accept the 2017 Entrepreneurial Excellence Award presented to businesses in southeastern Virginia by Regent University School of Business & Leadership and Inside Business.

Preceded by an entrepreneur panel discussion, the Entrepreneurial Excellence Award luncheon and awards ceremony will be held June 12, 2017, at The Founders Inn in Virginia Beach.

Entrepreneurship is a life-long journey.

Ned Lilly’s entrepreneurial path began as a paperboy delivering newspapers printed by the company that would later mentor him as an adult, Landmark Communications, best known for its creation of The Weather Channel.

After working in politics and technology in Washington, D.C., Lilly returned to his Norfolk, Va., hometown to work on entrepreneurship efforts at Landmark, directing corporate venture investments, mergers and acquisitions, and start-up activity. In 1999, Lilly co-founded a Landmark-incubated company, Great Bridge, built around the PostgreSQL open source database, the core technology used at xTuple.

In 2001 – barely weeks after the September 11 attacks – Lilly took his biggest entrepreneurial leap of faith and co-founded the company that became xTuple. Persevering through difficult economic years which followed 9/11, xTuple grew into a profitable company that today successfully competes with industry titans hundreds of times its size. Lilly’s vision focused on harnessing the power of global collaboration through open source development – which leads to higher quality software, developed faster and at a lower cost.

Today, a global community of customers, partners and power users have put xTuple on a path to long-term profitable growth. The company, funded by Lilly, his friends, family and local investors, has taken no institutional capital to date.

Entrepreneurship is a series of hits and misses, trial and error.

Lilly’s entrepreneurial vision steered him away from federal business – the Hampton Roads gross regional product is heavily reliant on military and federal spending – and toward other growth opportunities and industry sectors such as manufacturing and technology.

Lilly saw a need in the marketplace for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solution for small to mid-sized manufacturing businesses who need the same powerful tools that larger companies use from vendors such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.

By harnessing the power of open source, xTuple makes high-end enterprise-level functionality available to smaller companies who normally find such software solutions too expensive and complex.

Today xTuple has 200+ commercially licensed customers, with thousands more using the free version, and a community of users who give back, including translating and localizing the software for dozens of countries, languages, and tax authorities around the globe.

xTuple revels in its underdog status, disrupting the staid market of ERP software dominated by vendors and private-equity-funded behemoths who roll-up customers of legacy applications. Lilly publishes an industry blog about ongoing mergers and acquisitions in the space which leads to unsupported products and orphaned customers, and xTuple as a solution: “The ERP Graveyard.”

"xTuple" is a verb – to grow; to increase exponentially.

Lilly’s xTuple is a company with a mission: to help companies of all sizes successfully implement powerful, and easy-to-use, open source ERP software to grow their business profitably. The open source software development process – enabling the company to deliver enterprise-class technology products and services at an affordable cost – is the primary way xTuple differentiates itself operationally from competitors, leveraging open source into a commercially viable business model.

xTuple, the product, is powerful tools – critical functions of accounting, sales, customer and supplier management, eCommerce, inventory control, manufacturing and distribution – and gives customers the ability to tailor solutions with multi-platform support for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile, on-premise or in the Cloud.

The open source process – which highly values transparency, openness and peer review – also leads to continued innovation inside the company, building a culture where "the best code wins" but not just limited to code. The same culture drives professional services, customer support, even sales and marketing – where xTuple is unique in publishing its pricing online, including a calculator to compare options.

xTuple, today and tomorrow.

With new products ready for market, Lilly expects continued growth in top-line sales and operating margins this year.

xTuple owns and occupies a 10,000-square foot 1940s-era bank building – renovated for high-tech – in the "Innovation Corridor" of downtown Norfolk. The culture is "work hard, play hard" with fun offerings such as ping pong, pool, air hockey, foosball, and a year-round “Star Trek” Christmas tree. Heavy on geekery, xTuple frequently hosts Tech Meetups, prize-filled hackathons and company outings to superhero movies. Distant employees regularly fly-in to collaborate at “all-hands” company meetings, from as far away as New Zealand. With today’s technology, remote work is fully supported.

More substantively, all employees participate in quarterly profit-sharing, are eligible for company-provided health benefits and receive stock options – a perk of the company Lilly created at its founding and steadfastly continues.

Working for Lilly offers a career that’s challenging, satisfying — and motivating. Employees, known as “xTuplers,” live the company mission. One of the first interview questions is: can you help growing companies improve the way they do business? xTuplers are all entrepreneurs, encouraged and incubated by an entrepreneur, empowering others, giving back and paying it forward.

Many xTuplers, including Lilly, are active in organizations focused on supporting entrepreneurship and economic development in Virginia and nationally, including the region’s Hatch incubator (Lilly is an investor and advisor), Greater Norfolk Corporation, Downtown Norfolk Council, and Hampton Roads Community Foundation’s Reinvent Hampton Roads.

xTuplers are big volunteers. They provide children in under-served, disadvantaged neighborhoods access to arts and cultural activities; fund- and friend-raise for local nonprofits, including public media and education; charitable organizations dedicated to curing serious medical conditions; technology councils; First Robotics; scouting; and environmental causes.

xTuple also has a longstanding history of mentoring high school and college students via internships, several of which have led to full-time employment.

Featured in the 2017 season of the award-winning nationally televised series “Innovations with Ed Begley, Jr.” — exploring the latest breakthroughs in sustainable technology and manufacturing solutions. Watch the TV Episode.

xTuple is powerful tools to Grow Your World®. Discrete pieces of the system, called ERPlets™, may be utilized separately, without implementing the entire ERP system. xTuple gives customers the ability to tailor solutions with multi-platform support for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile as well as flexible licensing and pricing options.